Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me_ (And Other Concerns) - Mindy Kaling [11]
Mavis and I bonded over comedy. It didn’t matter if it was good or bad; at fourteen, we didn’t really know the difference. We were comedy nerds, and we just loved watching and talking about it nonstop. We holed up in my family’s TV room with blankets and watched hours of Comedy Central. Keep in mind this is not the Comedy Central of today, with the abundance of great shows like South Park, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report. This was the early ’90s, where you had to really search around to find decent stuff to watch. We’d start with the good shows, Dr. Katz, Kids in the Hall, or Saturday Night Live reruns, but when those were over, we were lucky if there was some dated movie playing like Porky’s or Kentucky Fried Movie. With all the raunchy ’80s sex comedies Comedy Central played, at times it felt like we were watching a confusing soft-core porn channel. It wasn’t our favorite programming, but like the tray of croissants from Costco my mom left for us on the kitchen table, Mavis and I devoured it nonetheless. We loved comedy and wanted to watch everything. And more than that, we loved reenacting what we saw. The Church Lady’s catchphrases were our catchphrases, and we repeated them until my mother said, exasperated: “Please stop saying ‘Isn’t that special?’ in that strange voice. It is annoying to me and to others.”
At fourteen, Mavis was already five foot ten. She had short, dark, slicked-back hair like Don Johnson in Miami Vice. She was very skinny and had women’s size eleven feet. I know this because she accidentally wore my dad’s boat shoes home one time. Mavis was a big, appreciative eater, which my parents loved. When she visited, she made a habit of immediately opening the fridge and helping herself to a heaping bowl of whatever leftover Indian food we had and a large glass of orange juice. “This roti and aloo gobi is delicious, Dr. Chokalingam,” she’d say to my mother, between bites. “You should start a restaurant.” My mother always protested when Mavis called her by the formal “Dr.” name, but I think it secretly pleased her. She was sick of some of my other friends saying things like: “Hey, Swati, how’s the practice going?” in that modern, we-call-parents-by-their-first-names fashion of liberally raised East Coast kids. Both my parents were very fond of Mavis. Who wouldn’t love a hungry, complimentary, respectful kid?
But that was Saturday. At school, I had a completely different set of friends.
My posse at school was tight, and there were exactly four of us: Jana, Lauren, Polly, and me. We had been friends since middle school, which was only two years, but seemed like a lifetime. The number of people in our friend group was important because of all the personalized best friend gear we had that read “JLMP,” the first letters of our first names. We had JLMP beaded bracelets, JLMP embroidered bobby socks. We commissioned a caricature artist at Faneuil Hall in Boston to do a cartoon of the four of us with JLMP in giant cursive letters underneath. These mementos cemented our foursome to both us and the other people at school. You couldn’t get in, and you couldn’t get out. Nothing says impenetrability and closeness like a silk-screened T-shirt with an acronym most people don’t understand. JLMP knew who Mavis was—she was a lifer at our school, which meant she had been there since kindergarten, and longer than any of us had been there—but she made no impact on our view of the social landscape. We didn’t really talk or think about her; it was as if she was a substitute Spanish teacher or something.
The Cheesecake Factory played a major role in JLMP’s social life. We went there every Friday after school. These were our wild Friday night plans. Remember, this was back in the ’90s, before the only way to be a cool teenager was to have a baby or a reality show (or both). We’d stay for hours chewing on straws and gossiping about boys, and collectively only spend about fifteen dollars on one slice of cheesecake and four Cokes. Then we’d leave